PARK CITY, Utah — David Lowery had just finished making Pete's Dragon, his first big-budget movie, for Disney. He wanted to knock out a smaller project fast, while he had the time. He was looking for a changeup, and he had an idea: a ghost story about a couple, a house and the passage of time.

And that's how A Ghost Story, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last weekend, came to be. Shot over 19 days last summer in Irving (Lowery's hometown), Dallas and other local haunts, Ghost is, in Lowery's words, "a straight-up art house movie," deliberative, experimental and more contemplative than scary.

"It is a pretty straightforward ghost story in a lot of ways," Lowery says over coffee. "Except for the fact that the ghost is Casey Affleck wearing a sheet with two eyes cut in it."

Rooney Mara (left) and Casey Affleck in a scene from "A Ghost Story," by filmmaker David Lowery, an official selection of the NEXT program at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. The film reunites co-stars Mara and Affleck, who starred as outlaw lovers in "Ain't Them Bodies Saints." (Andrew Droz Palermo/Sundance Institute via AP)

Yes, there is that. Affleck, fresh off his Oscar nod this week for best actor in Manchester By the Sea, plays a musician living in a dinged-up ranch-style house with his wife (Rooney Mara, who also co-starred with Affleck in Lowery's 2013 Sundance film Ain't Them Bodies Saints). After dying in a car accident (we see only the aftermath), he rises from a hospital gurney, stays draped in a white sheet, and commences to haunt his old house.

The distributor A24, which released the multi-Oscar nominee Moonlight, purchased A Ghost Story before Sundance started. It will have a post-festival life. But don't expect a Paranormal Activity-type thriller. With its long takes and hazy lighting, the film feels more like a cinematic meditation from Béla Tarr or Andrei Tarkovsky than a linear narrative. The square aspect ratio creates an intentionally designed sense of entrapment. This is a patient, committed film that demands patience and commitment from its audience.

David Lowery

((Sundance Institute))

"It's not traditional in any shape or form," Lowery says. "It's probably the most abstract thing I've ever done, and it'll provoke some interesting reactions. I think it will frustrate a lot of people, I think some people will walk out of it, but I think there are a small number of people who will love it, and I am excited for them to see it."

Not that action fans will leave empty-handed. It's not every day you get to see a house destroyed by heavy machinery in real time. The movie even gives you time to get a little attached to the house. But Lowery felt the story required the dwelling to be demolished. And boy, is it demolished.

First they found the house, which was located off Belt Line Road in Irving (a couple miles from where Lowery grew up) and slated for demolition. Then they fixed it up to shoot the characters living it. Then they smashed it to pieces.

"It's a great way to take out all of your frustration," Lowery says. "You're in a hot house all summer, shooting with no air conditioning, so there's nothing better than to tear that house down on the last day of the shoot."

You'll find other Dallas locations here as well. One shot finds Affleck's ghost wandering the Trinity River floodplain (nice to see it getting some use). Office building interiors were shot at The Tower at Cityplace. When Affleck looks down on the city at night he's atop Museum Tower.

A Ghost Story has a lot of local talent as well. The locally based producers include Lowery's frequent collaborator Toby Halbrooks; Spiral Diner owner James M. Johnston (who also made the vegan chocolate cream pie that Mara wolfs down in a sustained fit of grief-binge eating), Adam Donaghey, and Liz Franke.

Lowery is no stranger to Sundance. The festival actually rejected his first feature, St. Nick, which premiered at SXSW. But he got in with Ain't Them Bodies Saints, and grew close to Sundance founder Robert Redford. Redford appeared in Pete's Dragon and will produce and star in Lowery's next film, The Old Man and the Gun.

At this year's festival Lowery also has a screenwriting credit on the Iraq war film The Yellow Birds, and he's serving on the short film jury. He's had a busy festival, and his schedule isn't about to let up: He's about to start shooting The Old Man and the Gun. After that comes another Disney movie, Peter Pan.